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COPYRICHT DEP08IK 



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MATTHEW ARNOLD 



BY 



FREDERIC HARRISON 



FEe 11 1896 5 

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3r6f 



l^t^ gotfe 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 

AND LONDON 
1896 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1896, 
By MACMILLAN AND CO. 



J. 8. Gushing & Co — Berwick k Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



^ 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 



The very name of Matthew Arnold calls up to memory 
a set of apt phrases and proverbial labels which have 
passed into our current literature, and are most happily 
redolent of his own peculiar turn of thought. How could 
modern criticism be carried on, were it forbidden to speak 
of 'culture,' of 'urbanity,' of 'Philistinism,' of 'distinc- 
tion,' of 'the note of provinciality,' of 'the great style'? 
What a convenient shorthand is it to refer to ' Barba- 
rians,' to 'the young lions of the Press,' to 'Bottles,' to 
' Arrainius,' to 'the Zeit-Geist ' — and all the personal and 
impersonal objects of our great critic's genial contempt ! 

It is true that our young lions (whose feeding time 
appears to be our breakfast hour) have roared themselves 
almost hoarse over some of these sayings and nicknames, 
and even the ' note of provinciality ' has become a little 
provincial. But how many of these pregnant phrases have 
been added to the debates of philosophy and even of 
religion ! ' The stream of tendency that makes for right- 
eousness,' 'sweetness and light' — not wholly in Swift's 
sense, and assuredly not in Swift's temper either of spirit 
or of brain — 'sweet reasonableness,' ^ das ge'>nei7ie, the 
' Abei^glatcbey are more than mere labels or phrases : they 
are ideas, gospels — at least, aphorisms. The judicious 
reader may recall the rest of these epigrams for himself, 
for to set forth any copious catalogue of them would be to 
indite a somewhat leonine essay oneself. Lord Beacons- 

1 N.B. Copyright also in England, i.e. United Kingdom. 

B I 



2 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

field, himself so great a master of memorable and prolific 
phrases, with admirable insight recognised this rare gift of 
our Arminius, and he very justly said that it was a 'great 
thing to do — a great achievement.' 

Now this gift of sending forth to ring through a whole 
generation a phrase which immediately passes into a prov- 
erb, which stamps a movement or a set of persons with a 
distinctive cognomen, or condenses a mode of judging them 
into a portable aphorism — this is a very rare power, and 
one peculiarly rare amongst Englishmen. Carlyle had it, 
Emerson and Lowell had it, Disraeli had it, but how few 
others amongst our contemporaries ! Arnold's current 
phrases still in circulation are more numerous than those 
of Disraeli, and are more simple and apt than Carlyle's. 
These eirea Trrepoevra fly through the speech of cultivated 
men, pass current in the market-place ; they are genera- 
tive, efficient, and issue into act. They may be right or 
wrong, but at any rate they do their work: they teach, 
they guide, possibly may mislead, but they are alive. It 
was noteworthy, and most significant, how many of these 
familiar phrases of Arnold's were Greek. He was never 
tired of recommending to us the charms of ' Hellenism,' of 
€v<f>vta, of epieikeia, the supremacy of Homer, 'the classi- 
cal spirit.' He loved to present himself to us as ev(\>vr}<^, as 
eiTieiKr)^, as /€a\oKaya06<; ; he had been sprinkled with some 
of the Attic salt of Lucian, he was imbued with the classi- 
cal genius — and never so much so as in his poems. 

I. The Poet. 

I His poetry had the classical spirit in a very peculiar and 
rare degree, and we can have little doubt now, when so 
much of Arnold's prose work in criticism has been ac- 
cepted as standard opinion, and so much of his prose work 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 



in controversy has lost its interest and savour, that it is his 
poetry which will be longest rememberedT) and there his 
finest vein was reachedA It may be said that no poet in 
the roll of our literature, unless it be Milton, has been so 
truly saturated to the very bone with the classical genius. 
And I say this without forgetting the Ode on a Grecian 
Urn, or the PrometJiens Unboimd, or Atalanta in Calydon ; 
for I am thinking of the entire compass of all the produc- 
tions of these poets who are very often romantic and 
fantastic. But we can find hardly a single poem of 
Arnold's that is far from the classical idea. 

His poetry, however, is 'classical ' only in general sense, 
not that all of it is imitative of ancient models, or has 
any affectation of archaism. It is essentially modern in 
thought, and has all that fetishistic worship of natural 
objects which is the true note of our Wordsworthian 
school. But Arnold is ' classical ' in the serene self- 
command, the harmony of tone, the measured fitness, the 
sweet reasonableness of his verse. This balance, this 
lucidity, this Virgilian dignity and grace, may be said to be 
unfailing. Whatever be its shortcomings and its limita- 
tions, Arnold's poetry maintains this unerring urbanity of 
form. There is no thunder, no rant, no discord, no intoxi- 
cation of mysticism, or crash of battle in him. Our poet's 
eye doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; 
but it is never caught 'in a fine frenzy rolling.' It is in 
this sense that Arnold is classical, that he has, and has uni- 
formly and by instinct, some touch of that 'liquid clearness 
of an Ionian sky ' which he felt in Homer. Not but what 
he is, in thought and by suggestion, one of the most truly 
modern, the most frankly contemporary of all our poets. 

It is no doubt owing to this constant appeal of his to 
modern thought, and in great degree to the best and most 
serious modern thought, that Arnold's poetry is welcomed 



4 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

by a somewhat special audience. But for that very reason, 
it is almost certain to gain a wider audience, and to grow 
in popularity and influence. His own prose has perhaps 
not a little retarded the acceptance of his verse. The 
prose is of far greater bulk than his verse : it deals with 
many burning questions, especially those of current poli- 
tics and theological controversies ; and it supplies whole 
menageries of young lions with perennial bones of conten- 
tion and succulent morsels wherewith to lick their lips. 
How could the indolent, or even the industrious reviewer, 
tear himself from the delight of sucking in 'the three Lord 
Shaftesburys ' — or it may, be from spitting them forth 
with indignation — in order to meditate with Empedocles 
or Thyrsis in verses which are at once ' sober, steadfast, 
and demure.' 

^The full acceptance of Arnold's poetry has yet to come. 
And in order that it may come in our time, we should be 
careful not to overpraise him, not to credit him with quali- 
ties that he never had. His peculiar distinction is his un- 
failing level of thoughtfulness, of culture, and of balance. 
Almost alone amongst our poets since Milton, Arnold is 
never incoherent, spasmodic, careless, washy, or banal. 
He never flies up into a region where the sun melts his 
wings ; he strikes no discords, and he never tries a mood 
for which he has no gift. He has more general insight 
into the intellectual world of our age, and he sees into it 
more deeply and more surely than any contemporary poet. 
He has a trained thirst for Nature ; but his worship of 
Nature never weakens his reverence of Man, and his 
brooding over man's destiny. On the other hand, he has 
little passion, small measure of dramatic sense, but a mod- 
erate gift of movement or of colour, and — what is perhaps 
a more serious want — no sure ear for melody and music^ 
As poet, Arnold belongs to an order very rare with us, 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 5 

in which Greece was singularly rich, the order of gno^nic 
poets, who condensed in metrical aphorisms their thoughts 
on human destiny and the moral problems of life. The 
type is found in the extant fragments of Solon, of Xenoph- 
anes, and above all of Theognis. The famous maxim of 
Solon — /jirjSev dyav (nothing overdone) — might serve as a 
maxim for Arnold. But of all the gnomic poets of Greece, 
the one with whom Arnold has most affinity is Theognis. 
Let us compare the io8 fragments of Theognis, as they 
are paraphrased by J. Hookham Frere, with the collected 
poems of Arnold, and the analogy will strike us at once : 
the stoical resolution, the disdain of vulgarity, the aversion 
from civic brawls, the aloofness both from the rudeness of 
the populace and the coarseness of ostentatious wealth. 
The seventeenth fragment of Theognis, as arranged by 
Frere, might serve as a motto for Arnold's poems and for 
Arnold's temper. 

I walk by rule and measure, and incline 
To neither side, but take an even line ; 
Fix'd in a single purpose and design. 
With learning's happy gifts to celebrate, 
To civilize and dignify the State ; 
Not leaguing with the discontented crew, 
Nor with the proud and arbitrary few. 

This is the very key-note of so many poems, of Culture 
and Anarchy, of 'sweetness and light,' of epieikeia ; it is 
the tone of the eupJuies, of the rerpd'ycovo'; dvev yjroyov, of 
the 'wise and good.' 

This intensely gnomic, meditative, and ethical vein in 
Arnold's poetry runs through the whole of his singularly 
equable work, from the earliest sonnets to the latest do- 
mestic elegies. His Muse, as he sings himself, is ever — 

Radiant, adorn'd outside ; a hidden ground 
Of thought and of austerity within. 



6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

This deep undertone of thought and of austerity gives a 
uniform and somewhat melancholy colour to every line of 
his verse, not despairing, not pessimist, not querulous, but 
with a resolute and pensive insight into the mystery of 
life and of things, reminding us of those lovely tombs in 
the Cerameicus at Athens, of Hegeso and the rest, who in 
immortal calm and grace, stand ever bidding to this fair 
earth a long and sweet farewell. Like other gnomic poets, 
Arnold is ever running into the tone of elegy ; and he is 
quite at his best in elegy. Throughout the whole series 
of his poems it would be difficult to find any, even the 
shorter sonnets, which did not turn upon this pensive phi- 
losophy of life, unless we hold the few Narrative Poems to 
be without it. His mental food he tells us was found in 
Homer, Sophocles, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius ; and his 
graver pieces sound like some echo of the imperial Medi- 
tations, cast into the form of a Sophoclean chorus. 

Of more than one hundred pieces, short or long, that 
Arnold has left, only a few here and there can be classed 
as poems of fancy, pure description, or frank surrender of 
the spirit to the sense of joy and of beauty. Whether he 
is walking in Hyde Park or lounging in Kensington Gar- 
dens, apostrophising a gipsy child, recalling old times in 
Rugby Chapel, mourning over a college friend, or a dead 
bird, or a pet dog, he always comes back to the dominant 
problems of human life. As he buries poor 'Geist,' he 
speculates on the future life of man ; as he laments ' Mat- 
thias ' dying in his cage, he moralises on the limits set to 
our human sympathy. With all his intense enjoyment of 
Nature, and his acute observation of nature, it never ends 
there. One great lesson, he says. Nature is ever teaching, 
it is blown in every wind — ^ the harmony of labour and of 
peace — ' ohne Hast, ohne Rast. Every natural sight and 
sound has its moral warning : a yellow primrose is not a 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 7 

primrose to him, and nothing more: it reveals the poet of 
the primrose. The ethical lesson of Nature, which is the 
uniform burden of Arnold's poetry, has been definitely 
summed up by him in the sonnet to a preacher who talked 
loosely of our 'harmony with Nature.' 

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, . 
And in that more lie all his hopes of good. 

Not only is Arnold what Aristotle called rjOiKcaraTO^, a 
moralist in verse, but his moral philosophy of life and man 
is at once large, wise, and deep. He is abreast of the 
best modern thought, and he meets the great problems of 
destiny and what is now called the 'foundations of belief,' 
like a philosopher and not like a rhetorician, a sentimen- 
talist, or a theologian. The essential doctrine of his verse 
is the spirit of his own favourite hero, Marcus Aurelius, 
having (at least in aspiration if not in performance) the 
same stoicism, dignity, patience, and gentleness, and no 
little of the same pensive and ineffectual resignation under 
insoluble problems. Not to institute any futile comparison 
of genius, it must be conceded that Arnold in his poetry 
dwells in a higher philosophic aether than any contempo- 
rary poet. He has a wider learning, a cooler brain, and a 
more masculine logic. However superior in fancy and in 
melody, when Tennyson deals with the mysteries of phi- 
losophy, too often he descends into the vague commonplaces 
of hymnology, or the devotional rhapsodies of an ambi- 
tious curate denouncing the heresies of Darwin.- And 
Browning, with all his mastery of dramatic psychology, 
has neither the philosophic training, nor the grasp of the 
ultimate problem of Man and his Environment which 
the instructed mind finds ever to the front with Arnold. 
It was not in vain that Arnold was so early inspired by 
echoes of Empedocles, to whom his earliest important 



8 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

poem was devoted, the philosopher-poet of early Greece, 
whom the Greeks called Homeric, and whose 'austere 
harmony ' they valued so well. Arnold's sonnet on 'The 
Austerity of Poetry,' of which two lines have been cited 
above, is a mere amplification of this type of poetry as an 
idealized philosophy of nature and of life. 

This concentration of poetry on ethics and even meta- 
physics involves very serious limitations and much loss of 
charm. The gnomic poets of Greece, though often cited 
for their maxims, were the least poetic of the Greek 
singers, and the least endowed with imagination. Aris- 
totle calls Empedocles more ' the natural philosopher than 
the poet.' Solon indeed, with all his wisdom, can be as 
tedious as Wordsworth, and Theognis is usually prosaic. 
Arnold is never prosaic, and almost never tedious : but the 
didactic poet cannot possibly hold the attention of the 
groundlings for long. Empedocks on Etna, published at 
the age of thirty-one, still remains his most characteristic 
piece of any length, and it is in some ways his high-water 
mark of achievement. It has various moods, lyrical, didac- 
tic, dramatic — rhyme, blank verse, monologue, and song 
— it has his philosophy of life, his passion for nature, his 
enthusiam for the undying memories of Greece. It is his 
greatest poem : but the average reader finds it twelve 
hundred lines too long, too austere, too indecisive ; and 
the poet himself withdrew it for years from a sense of its 
monotony of doubt and sadness, until he was encouraged 
bv Browning to restore it to his collection. 
F The high merit of Arnold's verse is the uniform level of 
tine, if austere, thought, embodied in clear, apt, graceful, 
measured form] If Tennyson can at times break into a 
Hugonic shriekiness, and even into some pulpit maudlin, 
and at times almost cloys us with a surfeit of honey, if 
Browning can take a plunge into a mud-bath of uncouth- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

ness and Wagnerian discords, if Swinburne once had his 
fits of histrionic hysterics and Aphrodisiac frenzies, Ar- 
nold keeps a firm hand on his Pegasus, and is always lucid, 
self-possessed, dignified, with a voice perfectly attuned to 
the feeling and thought within him. He always knew 
exactly what he wished to say, and he always said it ex- 
actly. He is thus one of the most correct, one of the least 
faulty, of all our poets, as Racine was ' correct ' and ' fault- 
less,' as in the supreme degree was the eternal type of all 
that is correct and faultless in form — Sophocles himself. 

As a poet, Arnold was indeed our Matteo seiiza errore^ 
but to be faultless is not to be of the highest rank, just as 
Andrea del Sarto in painting was not of the highest rank. 
And we must confess that in exuberance of fancy, in im- 
agination, in glow and rush of life, in tumultuous passion, 
in dramatic pathos, Arnold cannot claim any high rank at 
all. He has given us indeed but little of the kind, and 
hardly enough to judge him. His charming farewell lines 
to his dead pets, the dogs, the canary, and the cat, are full 
of tenderness, quaint playfulness, grace, wit, worthy of 
Cowper. The Forsaken Merman a.nd Tristram and Is etilt 
have passages of delightful fancy and of exquisite pathos. 
If any one doubt if Arnold had a true imagination, apart 
from his gnomic moralities, let him consider the conclusion 
of The Church of Brou. The gallant Duke of Savoy, 
killed in a boar hunt, is buried by his young widow in a 
magnificent tomb in the memorial Church of Brou, and so 
soon as the work is completed, the broken-hearted Duchess 
dies and is laid beside him underneath their marble ef^gies. 
The poet stands beside the majestic and lonely monument, 
and he breaks forth : — 

So sleep, for ever sleep, O marble Pair ! 

Or, if ye wake, let it be then, when fair 

On the carved western front a flood of light 



lO MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Streams from the setting sun, and colours bright 

Prophets, transfigured Saints, and Martyrs brave, 

In the vast western window of the nave ; 

And on the pavement round the Tomb there glints 

A chequer-work of glowing sapphire-tints. 

And amethyst, and ruby — then unclose 

Your eyelids on the stone where ye repose. 

And from your broiderM pillows lift your heads. 

And rise upon your cold white marble beds ; 

And, looking down on the warm rosy tints. 

Which chequer, at your feet, the illumined flints. 

Say : What is this f we are in bliss — forgiven — 

Behold the pavement of the courts of Heaven I 

Or let it be on autumn nights, when rain 

Doth rustlingly above your heads complain 

On the smooth leaden roof, and on the walls 

Shedding her pensive light at intervals 

The moon through the clere-story window shines. 

And the wind rushes through the mountain pines. 

Then, gazing up 'mid the dim pillars high, 

The foliaged marble forest where ye lie, 

Hush, ye will say, it is eternity ! 

This is the gliimnering verge of Heaven, and there 

The colu77ins of the heave fily palaces ! 

And, in the sweeping of the wind, your ear 

The passage of the Angels' wings will hear. 

And on the lichen-crusted leads above 

The rustle of the eternal rain of love. 

I have cited this beautiful passage as a specimen of 
Arnold's poetic gift apart from his gnomic quality of lucid 
thought. It is not his usual vein, but it serves to test 
his powers as a mere singer. It has fancy, imagination, 
metrical grace, albeit with some penury of rhyme, perfec- 
tion of tone. Has it the magic of the higher poetry, the 
ineffable music, the unforgotten phrase 1 No one has ever 
analyzed the 'liquid diction,' 'the fluid movement ' of great 
poetry so lucidly as Arnold himself. The fluid movement 
indeed he shows not seldom, especially in his blank verse. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. I I 

Sohrab and Riistiun, a fine poem all through, if just a little 
academic, has some noble passages, some quite majestic 
lines and Homero-eid similes. But the magic of music, 
the unforgotten phrase is not there. Arnold, who gave us 
in prose so many a memorable phrase, has left us in poetry 
hardly any such as fly upon the tongues of men, unless it 
be — 'The weary Titan, staggering on to her goal,' or 
'that sweet city with her dreaming spires.' These are 
fine, but not enough. 

Undoubtedly Arnold from the first continually broke 
forth into some really Miltonic lines. Of Nature he cries 
out : — 

Still do thy sleepless ministers move on 
Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting — 

Or again, he says, 

Whereo'er the chariot wheels of life are roll'd 
In cloudy circles to eternity. 

In the Scholar-Gypsy^ he says. 

Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes ! 
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed. 

Arnold has at times the fluid movement, but only at 
moments and on occasions, and he has a pure and highly 
trained sense of metrical rhythm. But he has not the 
yet finer and rarer sense of melodious music. We must 
even say more. He is insensitive to cacophonies that 
would have made Tennyson or Shelley * gasp and stare.' 
No law of Apollo is more sacred than this : that he shall 
not attain the topmost crag of Parnassus who crams his 
mouth while singing with a handful of gritty consonants. 

It is an ungracious task to point to the ugly features of 
poems that have unquestionably refined modulation and 
exquisite polish. But where Nature has withheld the ear 
for music, no labour and no art can supply the want. And 



12 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

I would ask those who fancy that modulation and polish 
are equivalent to music to repeat aloud these lines amongst 
many : — 

— The sandy spits, the shore-lock''d lakes. — 

— Kept on after the grave, but not begun — 

— Couldst thou no better keep, O Abbey old ! — 

— The strange scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky — 

— From heaths starr'd with broom. 
And high rocks throw mildly 
On the blanch'd sands a gloom. 

These last three verses from the Forsaken Mej^mau, wherein 
Arnold perhaps cauie nearest to the echo of music and to 
pure fantasy. Again of Shakespeare has he not said that 
he was : — 

Self-schooPd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure — 

Here in one line are seven sibilants, four 'selfs,' three sc, 
and twenty-nine consonants against twelve vowels in one 
verse. It was not thus that Shakespeare himself wrote 
sonnets, as when he said : — 

Full many a glorious morning have I seen 
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye. 

/ It must be remembered that Arnold wrote but little 
(verse, and most of it in early life, that he was not by pro- 
fession a poet, that he was a hardworked inspector of 
schools all his days, and that his prose work far exceeds 
his verse. This separates him from all his contemporary 
rivals, and partly explains his stiffness in rhyming, his 
small product, and his lack of melody. Had he been able 
like Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, to 
regard himself from first to last as a poet, to devote his 
whole life to poetry, to live the life 'of thought and of 
austerity within ' — which he craved as poet, but did not 
achieve as a man — then he might have left us poems 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 1 3 

more varied, more fanciful, more musical, more joyous. 
By temperament and by training, he, who at birth, as he 
tells us, ' was breathed on by the rural Pan,' was deprived 
of that fountain of delight that is essential to the highest 
poetry, the dithyrambic glow — the avrjpiO ixov yeXaa/jLa : — 

The countless dimples of the laughing seas — ^ 

of perennial poetry. This perhaps, more than his want of 
passion, of dramatic power, of rapidity of action, limits the 
audience of Arnold as a poet. But those who thirst for 
the pure Castalian spring, inspired by sustained and lofty 
thoughts, who care for ti**fe — ( nr ov Sa i oT i ^ — that ' high 
seriousness,' of which he spoke so much as the very 
essence of the best poetry, — have long known that they 
find it in Matthew Arnold, more than in any of his even 
greater contemporaries. 

II. The Critic 

About Matthew Arnold as critic of literature it is need- 
less to enlarge, for the simple reason that we have all long 
ago agreed that he has no superior, indeed no rival. His 
judgments on our poets have passed into current opinion, 
and have ceased to be discussed or questioned. It is, per- 
haps, a grave loss to English literature that Arnold was 
not able, or perhaps never strove, to devote his whole life 
to the interpretation of our best poetry and prose, with the 
same systematic, laborious, concentrated energy which has 
placed Sainte-Beuve at the head of French critics. With 
his absorbing professional duties, his hardly austere aloof- 
ness from the whirlpool of society, his guerilla warfare 
with journalism, Radicals, theologians, and all devotees of 
Dagon, it was not destined to be that Arnold could vie with 

1 E. H. Pember, Q.C. 



C A 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the vast learning and Herculean industry of Sainte-Beuve. 
Neither as theologian, philosopher, nor as publicist, was 
Arnold at all adequately equipped by genius or education 
for the office of supreme arbiter in all knowledge which he 
so airily, and perhaps so humorously, assumed to fill. And 
as poet, it is doubtful whether, with his Aurelian tempera- 
ment and treacherous ear, he could ever have reached a 
much higher rank. But as critic of literature, his exqui- 
site taste, his serene sense of equity, and that genial mag- 
nanimity which prompted him to give just value for every 
redeeming quality of those whom he loved the least — this 
made him a consummate critic of style. Though he has 
not left us an exhaustive review of our literature, as Saint e- 
Bewve—has-^-one- for -France, he has given us a group of 
short, lucid, suggestive canons of judgment, which serve 
as landmarks to an entire generation of critics. / 

The function of criticism — though not so high and 
mighty as Arnold proclaimed it with superb assurance — 
is not so futile an art as the sixty-two minor poets and the 
ii,ooo minor novelists are now wont to think it. Arnold 
committed one of the few extravagances of his whole life 
when he told us that poetry was 'the criticism of life,' 
that the function of criticism was 'to see all things as 
they really are in themselves' — the very thing Kant told 
us we could never do. On the other hand, too much of 
what is now called criticism is the improvised chatter of 
a raw lad, portentously ignorant of the matter in hand. It 
is not the 'indolent reviewer' that we now suffer under, 
but the 'lightning reviewer,' the young man in a hurry 
with a Kodak, who finally disposes of a new work on the 
day of its publication. One of them naively complained 
the other morning of having to cut the pages, as if we ever 
suspected that he cut the pages of more than the preface 
and table of contents. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. I 5 

Criticism, accajxUng-to-Acn-oLd's. .practice,- if not accord- 
fng_Jjo bis theory of omniscience, had as its duty to lay 
down decisive canons of cultured judgment, to sift the 
sound from the vicious, and to maintain the purity 
of language and of style. To do all this in any mas- 
terly degree requires most copious knowledge, an almost 
encyclopaedic training in literature, a natural genius for 
form and tone, and above all a temper of judicial bal- 
ance.y Johnson in the last century, Hallam, and possibly 
Southey, in this century, had some such gift : Macauiay 
and Carlyle had not ; for they wanted genius for form and 
judicial balance. Now Arnold had this gift in supreme 
degree, in a degree superior to Johnson or to Hallam. He 
made far fewer mistakes than they did. He made very 
few mistakes. The touchstone of the great critic is to 
make very few mistakes, and never to be carried off his 
balance by any pet aversion or pet affection of his own, 
not to be biassed so much as a hair's breadth by any 
salient merit or any irritating defect, and always to keep 
an eye well open to the true proportion of any single book 
in the great world of men and of affairs, and in the mighty 
realrh of general literature.^ - 

For this reason we have so very few great critics, for 
the combination of vast knowledge, keen taste, and serene 
judgment is rare. It is thus so hard for any young person, 
for women, to become great in criticism :- the young lack 
the wide experience ; women lack the cool judicial temper ; 
they are too sympathetic, unwilling to see the faults where 
they admire and love, or to see merits where they dislike. 
It is common enough to find those who are very sensitive 
to some rare charm, very acute to detect a subtle quality, 
or justly severe on some seductive failure. The rare power 
is to be able to apply to a complicated set of qualities the 
nicely adjusted compensations, to place a work, an author. 



l6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

in the right rank, and to do this for all orders of merit, 
with a sure, constant, unfailing touch — and without any 
real or conspicuous mistake. 

This is what Arnold did, at any rate for our later poetry. 
He taught us to do it for ourselves, by using the instru- 
ments he brought to bear. He did much to kill a great 
deal of flashy writing, and much vulgarity of mind that 
once had a curious vogue. I am myself accused of being 
laudator temp oris acti, and an American newspaper was 
pleased to speak of me as^'this hopeless old man'; but I 
am never weary of saying, that at no epoch of our literature 
has the bulk of minor poetry been so graceful, so refined, 
so pure ; the English language in daily use has never been 
written in so sound a form by so many writers ; and the 
current taste in prose and verse has never been so just. 
And this is not a little owing to the criticism of Arnold, 
and to the ascendency which his judgment exerted over 
his time. 

To estimate that lucidity and magnanimity of judgment 
which he possessed, we should note how entirely open- 
minded he was to the defects of those whom he most 
loved, and to the merits of those whom he chiefly con- 
demned. His ideal in poetry is essentially Wordsworthian, 
yet how sternly and how honestly he marks the longueurs 
of Wordsworth, his flatness, his mass of inferior work. 
Arnold's ideal of poetry was essentially alien to Byron, 
whose vulgar, slipshod, rhetorical manner he detested, 
whilst he recognised Byron's Titanic power : ' our soul had 
felt him like the thunder's roll.' Arnold saw all the blun- 
ders made by Dryden, by Pope, by Johnson, by Macau- 
lay, by Coleridge, by Carlyle — but how heartily he can 
seize their real merits ! Though drawn by all his thoughts 
and tastes towards such writers as Senancour, Amiel, 
Joubert, Heine, the Guerins, he does not affect to forget 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. I 7 

the limitations of their influence, and the idiosyncrasy of 
their genius. In these days, when we are constantly as- 
sured that the function of criticism is to seize on some 
subtle and yet undetected quality that happens to have 
charmed you, and to wonder, in Delphic oracles, if Milton 
or Shelley ever quite touched that mystic circle, how re- 
freshing it is to find Arnold always cool, always judicial 
— telling us even that Shakespeare has let drop some 
random stuff, and calmly reminding us that he had not 
'the sureness of a perfect style,' as Milton had. Let us 
take together Arnold's summing up of all the qualities 
of Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and we shall see 
with what a just but loving hand he distributes the alter- 
nate need of praise and blame. Ama7tt altenia CamceiKB. 
But of all the Muses, she of criticism loves most the 
^ternate modulation of soprano and basso. 
' .Not that Arnold was invariably right, or that all his 
judgments are unassailable. His canons were always 
right • but it is not in mortals to apply them unerringly, 
to men and to things. He seems somewhat inclined to 
undervalue Tennyson, of whom he speaks so little. He 
has not said enough for Shelley, perhaps not enough for 
Spencer, nor can we find that he loved with the true 
ardour the glorious romances of Walter Scott. , But this 
is no place, nor can I pretend to be the man, to criticise 
our critic. For my own part, I accept his decisions in the 
main for all English poetry, and on general questions of 
style.i Accept them, that is, so far as it is in human 
nature to accept s^ch high matters ; — ' errors excepted,* 
exceptis excipiendis. Tho. important point on which his 
judgment is the most likely to be doubted or reversed by 
the supreme court of the twentieth century, lies in the 
relative places he has assigned to Wordsworth and to 
Shelley. \,He was by nature akin to Wordsworth, alien to 



I 8 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Shelley ; and the ' personal equation ' may have told in this 
case. For my own part, 1 feel grateful to Arnold for 
asserting so well the daemonic power of Byron, and so 
justly distinguishing the poet in his hour of inspiration 
from the peer in his career of affectation and vice. 
Arnold's piece on the ' Study of Poetry,' written as an 
introduction to the collected English Poets, should be 
preserved in our literature as the noi^ma, or canon of right 
opinion about poetry, as we preserve the standard coins 
in the Pyx, or the standard yard measure in the old Jewel- 
house at Westminster. 

III. The Philosopher and Theologian 

Matthew Arnold, the philosopher, the politician, the 
theologian, does not need prolonged notice, inasmuch as 
he was anxious to disclaim any title to be ranked as any 
one of the three. But he entered into many a keen debate 
on philosophy, politics, and religion ; and, whilst disavow- 
ing for himself any kind of system of belief, he sate in 
judgment on the beliefs of others, and assured us that 
the mission of Culture was to be supreme Court of Ap- 
peal for all the brutalities of the vulgar, and all the 
immaturities of the ignorant. Indeed, since the very defi- 
nition of Culture was * to know the best that had ever 
been done and said,' to be 'a study of perfection,' *to see 
things as they really are,' this Delphic priest of Culture 
was compelled to give us oracles about all the dark prob- 
lems that harass the souls of philosophers, of politicians, 
and of theologians. He admitted this sacred duty, and 
manfully he strove to interpret the inspirations of the God 
within him. They were often charged with insight and 
wisdom .; they were sometimes entirely mysterious ; they 
frequently became a matter of language rather than of 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. I9 

fact. But these responses of the Deity have found no 
successor. Nor does any living Mentor now attempt to 
guide our halting steps into the true path of all that 
should be done or may be known, with the same sure 
sense of serene omniscience. 

Of Culture — which has so long been a synonym for 
our dear lost friend — it can hardly be expected that I 
should speak. I said what I had to say nearly thirty 
years ago, and I rejoice now to learn from his letters that 
my little piece gave him such innocent pleasure. He con- 
tinued to rejoin for years ; but, having fully considered 
all his words, I have nothing to qualify or unsay. We are 
most of us trying to get what of Culture we can master, 
to see things as they are, to know the best, to attain to 
some little measure of Sweetness and Light — and we can 
only regret that our great Master in all these things has 
carried his secret to the grave. The mystery still remains, 
zvhat is best, how are things really as they are, by what 
means can we attain to perfection } Alas ! the oracles 
are dumb. Apollo from his shrine can no more divine. 

What we find so perplexing is, that the Master, who, 
in judging poetry and literature, had most definite prin- 
ciples, clear-cut canons of judgment, and very strict tests 
of good and bad, doctrines which he was always ready 
to expound, and always able to teach others, no sooner 
passes into philosophy, into politics, into theology, than 
he disclaims any system, principles, or doctrines of any 
kind. * Oh ! ' we hear him cry, * I am no philosopher, no 
politician, no theologian. I am merely telling you, in my 
careless, artless way, what you should think and do in 
these high matters. Culture whispers it to me, and I tell 
you ; and only the Philistines, Anarchs, and Obscurantists 
object.' Now, it is obvious that no man can honestly dis- 
pose of all that lies inter apices of Philosophy, Politics, 



20 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

and Religion, unless he have some scheme of dominant 
ideas. If he cannot range himself under any of the known 
schemes, if he be neither intuitionist, experimentalist, or 
eclectic, if he incline neither to authority, nor to freedom, 
neither to revelation, nor to skepticism, nor to any of the 
ways of thinking that lie between any of these extremes 
— then he must have a brand-new, self-originated, domi- 
nant scheme of his own. If he tends towards no system 
of ideas, then he tends to his own system ; and this is 
usually the narrowest and most capricious system that 
can be invented. 

Not that Matthew Arnold's judgments in these things 
were narrow, however personal. It would be easy to show, 
if this were the place, what were the schools and orders of 
thought under which he ranged himself. The idea that he 
was an Ariel, a 'blessed Glendoveer,' or Mahatma of 
Light, was a charming bit of playfulness that relieved the 
tedium of debate. Whether as much as he fancied was 
gained to the cause of Sweetness by presenting the other 
side in fantastic costumes and airy caricature, by the itera- 
tion of nicknames, and the fustigation of dummy oppo- 
nents, is now rather open to doubt. The public, and he 
himself, began to feel that he was carrying a joke too far 
when he brought the Trinity into the pantomine. Some 
of his playmates, it is said, rather enjoyed seeing them- 
selves on the stage, and positively played up to harlequin 
and his wand. And it was good fun to all of us to see our 
friends and acquaintances in motley, capering about to so 
droll a measure. 

With his refined and varied learning, his natural acute- 
ness, and his rare gift of poetic insight, Matthew Arnold 
made some admirable suggestions in general philosophy. 
How true, how fruitful are his sayings about Hebraism 
and Hellenism, about Greece and Israel, about the true 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 21 

Strength of Catholicism, about Pagan and Mediaeval 
religious sentiment, about Spinoza, about Butler, Marcus 
Aurelius, and Goethe ! And how valuable are his hints 
about education ! All of these, and many more, are radi- 
cally sound, and gain much by the pellucid grace and 
precision with which they are presented. They are pre- 
sented, it is true, rather as the treasure-trove of instinctive 
taste than as the laborious conclusions of any profound 
logic ; for Culture, as we have often said, naturally ap- 
proached even the problems of the Universe, not so much 
from the side of Metaphysics as from the side of Belles 
Lettres. I can remember Matthew Arnold telling us with 
triumph that he had sought to exclude from a certain 
library a work of Herbert Spencer, by reading to the com- 
mittee a passage therefrom which he pronounced to be 
clumsy in style. He knew as little about Spencer's Sy7i- 
thetic Philosophy as he did about Comte's, which he pre- 
tended to discuss with an air of laughable superiority, at 
which no doubt he was himself the first to laugh. 

Arnold, indeed, like M. Jourdain, was constantly talking 
Comte without knowing it, and was quite delighted to find 
how cleverly he could do it. There is a charming and 
really grand passage in which he sums up his conclicsion at 
the close of his Culture and Anarchy. I cannot resist the 
pleasure of quoting this fine piece of English, every word 
of which I devoutly believe : — 

But for us, — who believe in right reason, in the duty and possi- 
bility of extricating and elevating of our best self, in the progress of 
humanity towards perfection, — for us the framework of society, that 
theatre on which this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred ; and 
whoever administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from 
their tenure of administration, yet while they administer, we steadily and 
with undivided heart support them in repressing anarachy and disorder; 
because without order there can be no society, and without society 
there can be no human perfection. 



22 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

It SO happens that this, the summing up of the mission 
of Culture, is entirely and exactly the mission of Positivism, 
and is even expressed in the very language used by Comte 
in all his writmgs, and notably in his Appeal to Conserva- 
tives (1855). How pleasantly we can fancy Culture now 
meeting the Founder of Positivism in some Elysian Fields, 
and accosting him in that inimitably genial way : ' Ah, 
well ! I see now that we were not so far apart, but I never 
had patience to read your rather dry French, you know ! ' 

Of his Theology, or his Anti-Theology, even less need 
be said here. It was most interesting and pregnant, and 
was certainly the source of his great popularity and vogue. 
Here indeed he touched to the quick the Hebraism of our 
middle classes, the thought of our cultured classes, the 
insurgent instincts of the People. It was a singular mixt- 
ure — Anglican divinity adjusted to the Pantheism of 
Spinoza — to parody a famous definition of Huxley's, it 
was Anglicanism minus Christianity, and even Theism. 
It is difficult for the poor Philistine to grasp the notion 
that all this devotional sympathy with the Psalmists, Proph- 
ets, and Evangelists, this beautiful enthusiasm for 'the 
secret of Jesus ' and the 'profound originality ' of Paul, was 
possible to a man whose intellect rejected the belief that 
there was even any probable evidence for the personality 
of God, or for the celestial immortality of the soul, who 
flatly denied the existence of miracle, and treated the en- 
tire fabric of dogmatic theology as a figment. Yet this is 
the truth : and what is more, this startling, and somewhat 
parodoxical, transformation scene of the Anglican creeds 
and formularies sank deep into the reflective minds of 
many thinking men and women, who could neither abandon 
the spiritual poetry of the Bible nor resist the demonstra- 
tions of science. The combination, amongst many com- 
binations, is one that, in a different form, was taught by 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. 2$ 

Comte, which has earned for Positivism the title of Catholi- 
cism p/us Science. Matthew Arnold, who but for his 
father's too early death might have been the son of a 
bishop, and who, in the last century, would himself have 
been a classical Dean, made an analogous and somewhat 
restricted combination that is properly described as Angli- 
canism //?/j Pantheism. 

Let us think no more of his philosophy — the philosophy 
of an ardent reader of Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe : of his 
politics — the politics of an Oxford don who lived much at 
the Athenaeum Club: nor of his theology — the theology 
of an English clergyman who had resigned his orders on 
conscientious grounds. We will think only of the subtle 
poet, the consummate critic, the generous spirit, the radi- 
ant intelligence, whose over-ambitious fancies are even now 
fading into oblivion — whose rare imaginings have yet to 
find a wider and a more discerning audience. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 



BY 



FREDERIC HARRISON 



MACMILLAN AND CO. 

AND LONDON 
1896 

^// rights reserved 



^ N -(2 



